Of Dreams and Dreamers
by Artemis1000
Summary: Alfred F. Jones has always known that giant robots would save the world.


Notes: A TF speedwriting prompt response from July 2011, rediscovered on my hard drive and edited. "I think we're just gonna to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that." (The Royal Tenenbaums)

**Of Dreams and Dreamers**

For as long as he can remember, Alfred F. Jones, better known as the human personification of the United States of America, has loved robots.

When he was a small colony, not-yet a nation, Arthur, the British Empire, would tell him many bedtime stories. He liked the stories about golems and homunculi best.

His love for the stars grew from whimsical liking to painful longing when he came across England's scornfully discarded copy of Somnium sometime late in the 17th century.

Many years later he would ally with Francis during the Revolutionary War. Francis would introduce him to Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire's fantastical tales.

But Alfred's first and true love were robots long before Isaac Asimov made that term a household name.

Through all the hardships of growing up, Alfred had retained a child's vivid imagination. In his mind he battled the greatest villains and defeated the most gruesome monsters already when he was just a toddler colony. To be fair, he had already been strong enough to lift a bison.

His flights of fancy grew with his body.

Alfred still keeps a copy of Edward S. Ellis' The Steam Man of the Prairie in a place of honor. He used to be ever so giddy that he would live long enough to meet real steam-powered metal men one faraway day.

In the 1920s and 1930s, when science-fiction had its first real boom in his country as pulp fiction, he would devour the stories of exotic worlds and busty half-naked women with the enthusiasm he had for everything new and just vaguely exciting, but the robot stories… These were the ones that really got to him.

Needless to say, Alfred loved Metropolis.

The other nations came to curse it, for they believed Metropolis to be source of Alfred's infamous robot plans.

It didn't take long for him to start presenting yet another insane robot plan to exasperate the nations of the world at every World Conference. Let's crush the Commies with a giant robot. Let's build a giant robot superhero to block the sun and stop global warming. Let's build a robot, let's build another robot, why not try a robot for a change?

His fellow nations would treat his ideas with scornful or fond exasperation, but they always dismissed them as the fanciful flight of a nation who had remained a child at heart. If they were inclined to be kind, that is.

It isn't until the year 1984 – the irony isn't lost on Alfred – that he travels to a mountain in the middle of nowhere to gaze into the kind blue optics of a giant alien robot named Optimus Prime.

Alfred smiles.

He has always known that giant robots are going to save the world.

The end

.

Footnotes:  
Johannes Keppler's Somnium, written in 1609, published after Keppler's death. It is considered by some the first science-fiction novel. Keppler describes fictional astronomical observations from the moon as a way to introduce his real astronomical theories to a wider audience. It featured a dream trip to the moon, including zero gravity and detailed descriptions of the moon landscape.

Cyrano de Bergerac wrote two utopian novels L'Autre Monde: où les États et Empires de la Lune (The Other World: The States and Empires of the Moon) and Les États et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun), published 1657 and 1662 are classics of science-fiction. The States and Empires of the Moon again features a trip to the moon, where its fantastical inhabitants are encountered.

Voltaire's Micromégas of 1752 suggests that people from other planets may be more advanced than humanity.

The Steam Man in the Prairie was first published 1868 in Irwin P. Beadle's American Novels #48. The protagonist is driven around Rikscha-like by a "steam man" he built himself and eventually returns home as a hero.

Metropolis is a German silent movie from 1927. It features a futuristic city and machine-men.


End file.
